THE CIVIL WAR TO COME. That's my sometimes gloomy prediction about where arguments over water will lead. In the State Line, access to Lake Michigan water follows county boundaries, which leads to some unusual situations.

The compact would allow for Great Lakes water to be pumped into counties that straddle the Great Lakes basin dividing line, provided treated wastewater is returned to the lakes' watershed. Waukesha County communities would be eligible for such diversions under the compact.

The potential problem for Mukwonago, about 30 miles west of Milwaukee, is that a wedge of it lies in Walworth County, which is entirely outside the basin. A sliver of that wedge apparently includes part of [retired schoolteacher Tom] Gustafson's new four-bedroom, 2 1/2 -bathroom home.

Gustafson only recently learned he is living atop what could become one of the 21st century's most contentious borders - the line that could someday separate those who have access to Great Lakes water from everybody else. But Gustafson isn't sweating it.

Most contentious -- are others as pessimistic as I? Elsewhere, communities that straddle the crestline face a similar problem.

Mike Rissky knows all about the problem of living on the wrong side of the Great Lakes line.

The retired federal employee moved to New Berlin from Chicago 20 years ago, and one of the first things he noticed about his adopted home was the foul, salty taste of the water. He has always shunned his own faucets at home in favor of gallons of drinking water purchased at the grocery store.

Rissky's problem is he lives on the wrong side of New Berlin. The city straddles the Great Lakes basin dividing line, which is the existing boundary for most communities to legally access Great Lakes water. The east side of New Berlin is inside the line, and under current law, homes on that side of the line are allowed to take their drinking water from Lake Michigan.

Rissky and everyone west of the line who is hooked to the city public water system are left to suck from what is left of a shrinking and increasingly contaminated aquifer. To meet federal drinking water requirements, the city limps along in winter on the handful of wells left that don't exceed radium standards. During peak water use in summer months, contaminated wells are put back on line, pushing the city beyond Environmental Protection Agency limits for radium.

It's a problem everyone agrees must be fixed. New Berlin is pondering a $4 million filtration system to clean the contaminated well water. City officials say that will provide a fix for the next 20 years.

But New Berlin Mayor Jack Chiovatero said the problem could be solved more cheaply - and permanently - if the city's whole public water supply could be linked to Lake Michigan, something he says could be accomplished with a small number of new valves and pumps.

The technical fix to provide safe water to all residents on the city water system might be simple; the political issues are a different matter.

The new Great Lakes compact is still not settled in the United States. Somewhere in this development comes a treaty with Canada. In both countries there are representatives of states or provinces that do not adjoin the Lakes, who might have ideas of their own. The states that do adjoin the Lakes do not agree.

The compact would solve New Berlin's problem.

Because it allows diversions for cities split by the basin line, provided the treated waste water is returned, New Berlin would be a slam-dunk for approval under the new rules - its sewer system is already linked to Lake Michigan via the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. That's why Chiovatero supports the compact.

The nearby city of Waukesha is facing similar radium problems and also hopes to one day get Lake Michigan water, though unlike New Berlin, it would have to build a new sewer system to return the water to the lake. Still, Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson has also endorsed the compact because he sees it as the surest way for his city to tap Lake Michigan.

Despite the mayors' support, not everyone sees the compact as a good deal for Wisconsin.

The eight governors spent the better part of five years drawing up the compact in a process that included more than 60 public meetings and generated more than 13,000 public comments, and it is now up to the Great Lakes states' legislatures and Congress to decide whether to ratify the deal.

It has breezed through the legislatures in Minnesota, Indiana, New York and Illinois, with more than 90% of lawmakers in those states voting in favor. The Wisconsin Senate approved it, 26-6, on a bipartisan vote this month, despite [New Berlin's state senator Mary] Lazich's protests.

The article goes on to note potential disagreements with Michigan, a state where almost all runoff returns to the Lakes, and with Illinois, with the Chicago diversion grandfathered in (and currently providing fresh water to Plainfield.)

The war fears also arise in an article describing hard times in Dixie.

People hoping to protect the Great Lakes from becoming a Paul Bunyan-sized water cooler for an increasingly thirsty world like to invoke frightening language.

They say we'd better act fast to build a legal dike around the world's biggest freshwater system, because wars in the coming decades won't be fought over oil. They will be fought over water.

It can sound silly, especially in a shore-side city like Milwaukee, where the sun always rises on a horizon of boundless freshwater.

But there is nothing silly about what's unfolding less than 500 miles south of Lake Michigan. The Southeast is in the midst of a drought so severe some have been putting bowls under their air conditioners to capture the condensation dribble, and cities as big as Atlanta have stared down the prospect of literally running out of drinking water.

There are serious proposals to revise Georgia's borders, which do not square with an antebellum survey. What appears to be missing from discussions of southeastern water policy is any mention of pricing.

There is a history of water wars closer to home.

On the surface, the lake-freckled landscape in the Milwaukee suburbs of Waukesha County is as green as any you will find in the Midwest.

Settlers didn't even need to dig wells. The place bubbled with natural springs whose water quality was so famous that residents in the 1890s had to pull out a cannon to turn back laborers from Chicago who arrived with equipment and a devious scheme to pipe the water to the World's Fair in Chicago.

Although the famous Waukesha springs are tapped out, outlanders continue to covet water.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin told media last fall it would probably be a good idea for the city to start looking at laying pipelines beyond its basin borders to tap distant water sources.

New Mexico Governor and then-presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said last fall it was time for the water haves to start sharing with the have-nots.

"I believe that Western states and Eastern states have not been talking to each other when it comes to proper use of our water resources . . . states like Wisconsin are awash in water," Richardson told the Las Vegas Sun in October.

Reaction in the Great Lakes, where water levels have been flirting with historic lows, was swift and shrill, and Richardson quickly backpedaled on the statement.

The pressure on the Great Lakes is only going to increase as the Southeast and Southwest continue to swell.

Note, though: no discussion in any of these articles about pricing.

THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME?

In the pages of Minneapolis's Star-Tribune, it will be to fight off the great siphoning.

Those far-off onlookers thirst mightily for the Lakes’ 6.5 million billion gallons of fresh water that, to them, just sits there before running off to the ocean. Wasted.

It’s easy for us lake-landers to dismiss such thoughts, but those in the American Southwest are up against a 17-year drought that keeps getting worse. After an unusually warm winter, it’s expected to worsen still more this summer due to a dearth of mountain snow that will again leave Colorado River flow far below normal, with forecasts of dry and very hot weather à la La Niña.

What’s beyond scary is that NASA computer models indicate that the West could be facing a 50-year megadrought, the first such event since long before Europeans even knew North America existed.

The article mentions water stress in the Southwest, but doesn't get around to the root causes until late in the story.

Today, the West’s chief water user is agriculture, with three-fourths consumed by water-gulping crops like cotton, citrus, alfalfa and vegetables. Irrigated fields around hot, dry Yuma, Ariz., produce so many winter vegetables that nearly all of your salad comes from Yuma. Irrigated fields grow countless tons of alfalfa to feed livestock, crowded into giant feedlots nearby.

So much water is sucked from the Colorado to grow crops and quench thirsts that the river’s flow into Mexico is a relative trickle.

The Southwest’s water crisis is a result of dubious policy that pushed unsustainable growth, incented by federally financed dams, reservoirs and canals that delivered water at astonishingly low cost to cities and farmers.

Requirements that states and users repay the cost of building waterworks are often waived with little notice. Just one of these giant projects, the 336-mile concrete canal moving Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, cost $4 billion to build in the 1970s ($26 billion today) and many millions to maintain. Relatively little has been repaid to taxpayers, or ever will be.

I'll probably never, ever, get people, including people who ought to know better, to stop using the terms "cost" and "price" interchangeably. We can't, for instance, speak of rising health care costs until we know something about price discovery. The same error is present in the passage above.  The costs of the water and power projects are great, but those Yuma growers see low prices for the Colorado River water they use because they are living at the expense of somebody else.  I also recall, in the middle 1970s, something called "flood watering" being a thing in Phoenix.  Yup, cover your lawn with water.  We had water meters, and even in Milwaukee there was odd-even sprinkling days, even with new water intake cribs being built as the city grew, as it still was back then.

But nobody wants to get into the implications either of understanding that water is a commodity and ought be priced accordingly, or that those fresh vegetables (and Californian cheese, for Elsie's sake!) coming to the Twin Cities in the winter look cheaper because taxpayers in the Great Lakes are helping pay for those southwestern water projects, and they might be on the hook for even more water projects.

Less than 80 years ago, North Dakota had more electoral votes than Arizona, and Phoenix was a remote outpost. Today, Arizona has more people than North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota combined. That kind of growth is evident throughout the Southwest, which means more and more members of Congress are being sent by dry states rather than by the water-rich Midwest.

The article fears those Members will vote to provide benefits to their constituents, at the expense of everyone else.

Another option is to strictly restrict water use, but that’s politically dicey and can’t get much beyond talk.

Then there’s a plan to spend gazillions to capture several of Alaska’s free-flowing rivers with a grand network of dams, canals and tunnels to divert water south to the Colorado basin. It seems that the drought is getting serious enough so that even far-fetched ideas get a look.

So OK, now what?

To desert dwellers, an idea that makes intuitive sense is to pipe Lake Superior water to where it’s “needed.” Such a project would be staggeringly expensive but technically doable; besides, the Great Lakes surely wouldn’t miss, say, 50 billion gallons — would they?

The populace all around the Lakes is rock-solid against shipping any water anywhere, and advancing any diversion plan would set off political warfare.

Or perhaps one should say “renew hostilities.” This story isn’t new. In 2007, New Mexico’s then-Gov. Bill Richardson suggested a Great Lakes diversion when the Western drought was only six years old.

Note again: "strictly restrict," presumably by quotas or peer pressure or anything but price incentives, but this is the Star Tribune, y'see.  As far as the water diversions go, that idea is much older.  I remember people in Michigan, during the 1980s restructuring of Smokestack America, seriously suggesting that Michigan finance such a pipeline.  Cooler heads prevailed.

You want war, though?  I still fear that, long before the Second Minnesota face off against the Phoenix Zouaves, the Great Lakes Compact the Star Tribune columnists figure Congress will undo will come under severe pressure within states such as Illinois and Wisconsin that have Great Lakes coastlines.

THE WONDERFUL LIFE WE SQUANDERED.

It's Christmas, which means the culture studies types will be about their usual displays of cranky erudition.  That includes the movies.  The past two years we've examined the fun side of White Christmas.

This year, we'll feature It's a Wonderful Life, which a different class of culture studies types has gone after.  Ten years ago Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen wondered if the movie didn't anticipate a Suburban Experiment that would go wrong.

George [Bailey played by James Stewart] represents the vision of post-war America: the ambition to alter the landscape so as to accommodate modern life, to uproot nature and replace it with monuments of human accomplishment, to re-engineer life for mobility and swiftness, one unencumbered by permanence, one no longer limited to a moderate and comprehensible human scale.

George’s great dreams are thwarted by innumerable circumstances of fate and accident and he remains in Bedford Falls. Most of the film portrays a re-telling of various episodes of George’s life for the benefit of a guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers)—who is sent down to earth to attempt to save George during his greatest test.

While George’s grandiose designs are thwarted, he does not cease to be ambitious, and does not abandon the dream of transforming America, even if his field of dreams is narrowed.

I think that's a variation on the Tragic Vision, you bloom where you're planted.